Consumers are increasingly replacing traditional landline telephones with mobile phones. As a result, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the majority of emergency calls made to 911 are now made from mobile phones, and many mobile phone calls are made while indoors. Thus there is a high likelihood that a call made to 911 is from an indoor wireless device.
In order to effectively respond to an emergency call, Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) need to be able to accurately identify the location of the emergency caller so that emergency responders may be dispatched to the caller's precise location. Yet traditional location-determination technologies used by wireless devices, such as Assisted GPS (A-GPS), are optimized for outdoor calling and often ineffective or inaccurate when used indoors. As a result there exists a gap in emergency calling location-determination accuracy between when a call is made outdoors or from a landline as compared to when the call is made from an indoor wireless device. The inability to accurately identify the location of an emergency caller can have dire consequences.
To address this gap, the FCC has called on wireless network providers to help implement a variety of measures intended to enhance the ability of PSAPs to accurately identify the location of a wireless 911 caller when the caller is indoors. One such measure is a National Emergency Address Database (NEAD), a database with dispatchable location information and identifiers, such as media access control (MAC) addresses, of fixed wireless devices (e.g., WiFi access points, Bluetooth beacons, IoT devices, etc.). When making an emergency call, an indoor wireless device would report the identifiers of the fixed wireless devices it “sees,” which would be used, with reference to the NEAD, to provide indoor dispatchable location information of the wireless caller to the PSAPs.
Under its Fourth Order and Report In the Matter of Wireless E911 Location Accuracy Requirements, the FCC is requiring that the nationwide wireless network providers provide the information to populate the NEAD. There are, however, several challenges associated with acquiring the information needed for the NEAD. Thus there is a need for systems and methods that overcome these problems and provide additional benefits. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.